I found this a bit of a slog, to be honest. An awful lot of time is spent setting up the bourgeois country town whose peace is destroyed by a few men who turn to revolutionary violence for no particularly good reason. It's obviously rather chilling to read in retrospect, given that the forces of revolutionary violence did actually win in Russia ( Read more... )

I remember starting this book when I was a sixth-former, the memorable opening chapter introducing us to the fragile Prince Myshkin (the 'idiot' of the title) returning to St Petersburg by train after long years of ill health abroad. He finds himself at the centre of other people's familial and romantic intrigues; as an innocent, he rarely looks ( Read more... )

18) The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Finally shamed into reading this by this meme, though it was also part of my 2006 reading resolutionsAm I unusual in finding the grand sweeping philosophical monologues about the nature of God and Man very skimmable? Apart from the tendency of the characters to go into long diatribes reinforcing how ( Read more... )

Actually the full list of books I own but haven't read is here. The ten most frequently tagged as "unread" by other Librarything users are:

1. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky ( ☑)
2. Persuasion, by Jane Austen ( ☑)
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy ( ☑)
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison ( ☑)
5. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli ( ☑)
6. The System of the ( Read more... )

Polly: Do you like Dostoevsky?
Ted smiles blankly. Polly smiles and holds up 'Crime and Punishment'.
Ted: Oh! Oh, him? Oh, yes, that's one of my favourites, all right. I must have read that book...ten times.
Polly: I see you're reading it again. There's a bookmark here on page seven.
Ted smiles and nods.
Polly: Did you feel his sense of ( Read more... )

1) Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky/ Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский ( Read more... )